This genre embraces  scenes of everyday life. Since surrealism is a peculiar style in art whose main subject is the twilight states of human mind when the reality is intervowen into illusions, and the subjective cannot be clearly told from the objective, any efforts of applying traditional classification of genres in fine arts falls flat.

So, we single out portraits, landscapes and genre paintings in surrealism solely for the purpose of the reader’s convenience based on the premises that any associations that arise in the irrational subconscious of an artist still bear resemblance and are rooted in everyday activities. In any case, the objects, people and places, as well as their attributes and characteristics are chaotic and irrational in surrealist genre paintings. Big things may appear infinitely small, the solid becomes melted, and the time and space are minced to the point of absurdity. Every artistic means and tool an artist is equipped with is aimed at highlighting the absurdity of real everyday things, their qualities, people, places and combinations thereof. And so we see irrational proportions, perspective, lines, light and shadows that blur the line between real and illusional to the point when it’s impossible to tell real life scences from hallucinations. One moment you see a slave market – another moment it turns into the bust of Voltaire thanks to the effect of double images. We see people enjoying dinner sitting next to skeletons, we see illogical number of extremities or people with no faces, and the people in these paintings do weird things – like kissing with kerchiefs on their heads or literally raining from clear sky. Surrealists aimed at irrationalizing the reality and highliting the absurdity of the universal order, and for that purpose they resorted to the unusual states of mind when a person feels free from any laws and conventionalities. Since it is the state, not the actual scene that the artists strive to render in the paintings, we once again remind you that singling out any genre is far-fetched.